Thursday, July 27, 2017

t took three days for the Boy Scouts of America to address the controversy that followed President Donald Trump’s bizarre speech on Monday to the organization’s Jamboree. Three days, and the statement was not from the organization’s president, Randall L. Stephenson, but from Michael Surbaugh, its Chief Scout Executive.

Stephenson has 85 billion reasons to not pen an apology for Trump’s speech, which may explain why it took three days to craft the organization’s statement, which apologized “to those in our Scouting family who were offended by the political rhetoric that was inserted into the jamboree.” In popular culture, the act of offering an apology not for causing offense but for the fact that someone complained that they are offended is known as a “non-apology apology.” This was an example of that sort of apology.